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Monday, January 07, 2013

Movies: The Amazing Spider-Man

This is a well-made, perfectly fine film, but what's the damn point in remaking a movie that's only ten years old? Does Hollywood think the public's attention span is that short? Well, actually, they may have a point about that . . .So, taken for what it is, THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN has its good points and its not-so-good. As usual with comic book movies, it takes characters and plot points from years of continuity and crams them together in an arbitrary fashion to come up with a story. Movies like this always turn me into Comic Book Guy from THE SIMPSONS, as I sit there mentally grousing about this change and that change and that other thing they got totally wrong.However, this new version gets some things right that the 2002 movie got wrong, primarily giving Spidey web-shooters instead of making his web-spinning a natural ability. A lot of the shots are very Ditko-esque, enough so that I think it had to be deliberate. They get the feeling of the early issues right part of the time, anyway.Why, though, do you take somebody like Emma Stone, who would have made an excellent Mary Jane Watson, and cast her as Gwen Stacy instead? And I would have liked to see a nod to the other Marvel movies, as well. I mean, Spidey met the Fantastic Four in the very first issue of his own title, after making his debut in AMAZING FANTASY #15. He's always been part of the Marvel Universe. Why not acknowledge that?Sequels are clearly intended. If they get made, I'm sure I'll watch them, since I found enough to like in this one to keep me interested. What I'd really like to see, though, is a comic book movie that stays faithful to its source material.

9 comments:

For me, neither of the four Spidey movies stayed true to the comic-book beginning with Peter Parker. I never quite got used to Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man because he looks nothing like his comic-book character, who is more in the mould of, say, Val Kilmer (who, incidentally, made a better Bruce Wayne/Batman than Michael Keaton or any of the other actors in the role).

Same issue here. I liked it okay, but I can't for the life of me figure out why they felt it necessary to do an origin story again, even if it was a little different. There isn't a Spider-Man viewer out there that doesn't know the origin story, so for god sakes, just get on with. We've managed to deal with a variety of actors playing James Bond for 50 years and about 20 different actors playing life-action Superman, so just write a story.

Yeah, I loved THE AVENGERS, even though the purist in me quibbled about a few things there, too. I mean, it's not "The Tesseract", it's the blasted Cosmic Cube! I was there when the Red Skull found it! Call it what it is!

Thanks for the review, James. I thought Spider-Man 3 was bad, especially the way they handled Venom, but that doesn’t mean that I wanted to start from the beginning (again). Alone, in a bubble all by itself, The Amazing Spider-Man is a good movie. I was talking about recent developments in the comics with one of my DISH coworkers when they informed me that they haven’t seen The Amazing Spider-Man. He had to see it, so I went online and ordered it to download to my DISH Hopper DVR so that it would be ready to watch once we got to my place. He wasn’t very impressed, but we both agree that anything is better than what they are doing with the comic.